Why doesn't he get it?

[Owlie]

No words of wisdom, just empathy. (Was married 15 years...humph. Enough said).

FWIW, I've always wanted a cyclocross bike. Riding a CX is being a kid again. With a fancy road bike, you are limited to nice surfaces. And you have to be more careful with the bike. The steel Schwin Le Tour I grew up on might as well have been a XC for the way I treated it. The thing was bomb-proof. I remember riding up gravel piles.

If you really wanted to make your proposed CX a do anything bike, you could get a second set of nice road wheels with slicks. Maybe hand-built. Then the only difference would be that you had more reliable brakes. (More or less. ).

I agree--I want something I can abuse. That's the scariest thing to me about carbon--I feel like I'll have to treat it with kid gloves, even though logic tells me that that's not necessarily the case. Maybe that CAAD10 isn't such a bad idea, given the difficulties of getting my bike in and out of my apartment.